When someone mentions Christopher Columbus, my mind immediately takes me back to learning this rhyme from yes, a Mini Wheats commercial: “Christopher Columbus sailed the  ocean blue in 1492.” Aside from this quote, I remember pieces of history units in middle school that taught me Columbus discovered North America, and in a way, we have a reason to thank him for being here in the first place. What I, and most students today, never learn are the atrocities Columbus brought with him including enslavement, mass murder, and torture. After reading Zinn’s honest background on Columbus, I am shocked to say that probably 95% of the information given I have never heard. I didn’t even know Bartolomé de Las Casas was a person who ever existed. Aside from the horrible and gruesome acts Columbus led in North America, something I came to realize at the end of the reading was I was always taught to believe Columbus discovered unpopulated land that would now belong to Europeans. However, he instead disrupted a world that in some areas were “as densely populated as Europe itself.

Aside from learning the whole truth behind Columbus’ discovery of North America, another idea of Zinn’s that struck me was “the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress that is still with us.” As examples, Zinn mentions Hiroshima, Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation in general as ways that the United States has dealt with problems violently, but accepted it as needed. However, one act of inhumanity that the U.S. has never been able to back is the Holocaust. Another being the Rwandan Genocide. Or even the Cambodian Genocide. All of these events that have taken place in only the past century are frowned upon by Americans and taught to be intolerable, cruel acts against humanity. So how come in middle school I was taught that our use of nuclear warfare against Japan was needed and supported in order to help the U.S. win the war? Or how about the  Vietnam War, that I was told we technically won because we suffered less casualties? I am sure there are civilians worldwide who look at these violent events and disapprove of the United States’ actions. However, as citizens of this country, we have been taught to believe that if people claim it can help protect us, it is then alright to harm and murder members of other communities and populations.